Off Topic Politics Thread
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Updated with a quote from Jo Johnson's resignation statement as transport minister last November. He's now resigned as an MP, today or at the next election not confirmed. Illustrates a point I've made in the past re the cross party nature of brexit. A lot of the rabid leavers will be screaming traitor.
"Given that the reality of Brexit has turned out to be so far from what was once promised, the democratic thing to do is to give the public the final say. This would not be about re-running the 2016 referendum, but about asking people whether they want to go ahead with Brexit now that we know the deal that is actually available to us, whether we should leave without any deal at all or whether people on balance would rather stick with the deal we already have inside the European Union.
To those who say that is an affront to democracy given the 2016 result, I ask this. Is it more democratic to rely on a three-year-old vote based on what an idealised Brexit might offer, or to have a vote based on what we know it does actually entail?"
I agree but that was the way it went. Everyone was happy to vote under the circumstances at the time. The remainders would have been happy with that vote so why shouldn’t the leavers?
You're making a huge assumption. I wouldn't and wasn't. And I doubt if anyone else was once they realised the ramifications. You don't make a simple majority enough to seriously change a nation's destiny.
Beds, it's three years ago, water, bridges, under blah blah. See quote from Jo Johnson I just posted. sums up then and now very well. You know I've all ways been unhappy with the slight majority and believe that it should have been a QM vote. It's what happens next, delay, more negotiations, referendum, GE and in what order.
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Also the second referendum would benefit leavers by giving a clear answer between May's deal or no deal which has been troubling them.
If leave voters were united and agreed on a course of action we would have left by now.
Dont blame remainers for wanting to remain. Thats their democratic right. It's just at only 52%, leave voters need absolutely every leave vote working together to succeed, they dont have that.
If leave voters were united and agreed on a course of action we would have left by now.
Dont blame remainers for wanting to remain. Thats their democratic right. It's just at only 52%, leave voters need absolutely every leave vote working together to succeed, they dont have that.
There is some humour, this from Gove's appearance at the brexit committee.
"In the Brexit committee Michael Gove has just finished answering a series of questions about how Dover would cope with lorry arrivals in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Hilary Benn, the committee chair, did not sound hugely reassured, and he concluded by asking Gove to admit that no one actually knows what will happen in the event of no deal. Gove did not contest this, but replied:
The future is known only to the Almighty.
Benn said unfortunately the Almighty would not be appearing as a witness."
"In the Brexit committee Michael Gove has just finished answering a series of questions about how Dover would cope with lorry arrivals in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Hilary Benn, the committee chair, did not sound hugely reassured, and he concluded by asking Gove to admit that no one actually knows what will happen in the event of no deal. Gove did not contest this, but replied:
The future is known only to the Almighty.
Benn said unfortunately the Almighty would not be appearing as a witness."
The latest instalment from the fabulous Tom Walker, aka Jonathan Pie:
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I would actually argue that it was the side of light and informed comment. I know several Leavers. Collectively, they barely have a grasp on what they voted for. So I would call that the dark side.
Last night, after I left work, I was invited to go and dine with a few people I know, and one of the conversations I heard was that two of them were deciding what it was to be a National Socialist. The other explained that National Socialists were Neo-Nazis. So, the first person suggested that she was obviously a Neo-Nazi, in that case. And I know she isn't. She didn't really know the first thing about what Neo-Nazis stand for. I called across the table - "Do you consider that the Holocaust [the extermination of 6 million Jewish people in concentration camps] during WW2 never happened?" "No, of course not," came the answer. "Then you're not a Neo-Nazi," I replied. And this is an example of how a limp bit of hearsay, without verification, can infect people. People just take what others say as truth and don't check, while we have the greatest reference ever under our fingertips.
Unless you know, don't even take my word for things. Check.
I actually agree with most of that - the Lib Dem’s revival is probably attributable to their being in effect a single issue party. They came back from the dead on that ticket, but ultimately they are still tarnished by their association with the vicious austerity policies which they happily signed up to when in government with the Tories. As Jo Swinson was a member of that government, it will be interesting to see how she and her party defends that record during an election campaign.
Labour’s position on Brexit has caused it to lose ground precisely because it is nuanced, and the media certainly doesn’t do nuance, even if the electorate occasionally does.
But when the General Election does come, hopefully after Hilary Benn’s bill has passed into law, Labour will not fight it as a single issue election. Whether or not that tactic works, we’ll have to wait and see. But a Corbyn led Labour Party will try to make this election equally about the rise in inequality, the parlous state of the NHS, families reliant on food banks, the housing crisis, and pressing need to take key utilities like public transport back into public ownership. Let’s see if that chimes with electorate.
Labour will offer a People’s Vote on Brexit btw, but there is a danger they will still lose ground to the Lib Dems as the latter will be unequivocal on their support to bin off Brexit once and for all.
I could live with a Labour/SNP/Lib Dem/Green coalition btw. Not sure if Jo Swinson could, but we’ll see.
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Never been the same to me though since she stopped her kids tv program she had with her husband. That was fan-dabi-dozi
Oh, Beddy admitted that he voted LEAVE for reasons that he cannot share. Don't ask him, we've all done it, and have decided to respect his wishes.
I don't recall anyone getting a choice as to whether it should a tiny majority vote or a 2/3rds majority vote? (like the call an early election vote yesterday)
To be fair I would have been happy with a percentage majority
You are right as apparently for any referendum all that is needed is a majority. For some things going through parliament then a specific majority is needed as with the vote yesterday re the election.
In my house all momentous decisions have a 2/3rds majority vote! (my wife has 2/3rds of the vote)
First of all, I was unhappy that the referendum was ever called. No one, or only a tiny fraction of the population, wanted to leave the EU until the spectre of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive reared its head. Then, suddenly, Farage and the ERG, funded by the likes of Arron Banks and other super-rich figures, started eating into David Cameron’s pact with the Lib Dem’s and he decided to make a referendum part of the 2015 manifesto.
Secondly, the whole referendum campaign was flawed in the extreme: Cameron as leader of Remain, was shambolic and uninterested and couldn’t be bothered to appear on TV debates, and the Leave campaign was criminally fraudulent. The fact that Leave won an extremely narrow majority was, at least partly, due to illegal targeting of floating voters by millions of personalised tweets and Facebook posts. As I said earlier, the referendum would have been declared null and void by the Electoral Commission if it hadn’t been constituted as a purely advisory plebiscite. To his shame, Jeremy Corbyn wanted the new Prime Minister Theresa May to invoke Article 50 straight away, and she would have done but for the heroic legal battle won by Gina Miller, which forced the calling of Article 50 to be voted through in Parliament, which it very sadly was in March 2017.
Thirdly, the expectation of many people who voted Leave was that we would merely be leaving the political union, and still remaining linked with our largest trading partner via the Single Market and the Customs Union. This, by the way, would have meant no change to the “soft” border in Ireland. Theresa May, again at the behest of the right wing of her party, wanted nothing to do with either the SM or the CU, and her red lines led to the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement which, because of the perfectly reasonable Irish Backstop, was opposed by the ERG, and because it didn’t guarantee workers’ rights enjoyed within the EU would be protected once we left, and because we were out of the SM and CU, was opposed by everyone else except May’s own government.
The truth about Brexit and all its ramifications has slowly become clearer. In a nutshell, whichever form Brexit takes, we will be worse off. The only people to benefit will be the super-rich who won’t have their offshore assets taxed. Everyone else, everyone who reads this, every hospital patient waiting for an operation, every sheep farmer trying to sell their sheep to Europe, every worker in a car factory waiting for components held up by Customs checks, every single person in these islands and the rest of the EU will be worse off.
Time to have a second referendum with all the facts clear I’d say.
